Bruno Wolff III wrote:
I have been trying to figure out whether I can enable write caching on my
PATA hard drives (WD3200JB) and have fsync not return until data is
safely on the platters. I am also running software raid.
This is currently on FC5 (though soon to be FC6) with a 2.6.18 kernel.
From snippets I have found on the net, it looks like write barriers are
pushed down through software raid when using raid 1. So that if I mount
the file systems with data=ordered and barrier=1, I think I should be
OK, but I was hoping to get a more definitive answer.
It also looks like barrier=1 is or will be the default for ext3. Is there
a way I can check if this is the case on my system?
/proc/mounts doesn't show the barrier option when I use barrier=1 or don't
specify it at all. mount -lv shows the barrier option (when it was used
for mounting), but not the data option. I am not sure if either of these
are using the same data that the ext3 driver is using.
You can always do a sanity test on the barrier by timing how many synchronous
files/sec you can create (i.e., create/write/fsync/close). Speeds vary
depending on what kind of drive you have, journal mode, etc, but you will always
see much faster times with the barrier off than on while writing small files
(say 10K).
regards,
ric
_______________________________________________
Ext3-users mailing list
Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
